March 22, 1981: RCA SelectaVision Spins (Briefly) Into Stores

1981: RCA’s long-awaited videodisc system, essentially a vinyl record that plays video, hits stores in the United States. The company spent 15 years and $200 million developing it, only for the system to flop and slip into obscurity.

RCA ushered its SelectaVision videodisc player into 5,000 stores nationwide with “National Demonstration Week.” The company spared no expense, initiating a media blitz on March 16. The ad campaign put a $20 million dent in RCA’s budget, and the SelectaVision rollout was the most expensive project in the company’s history, according to Billboard.

The company estimated sales of about 26,000 players in the first five weeks. It went as far as to declare its videodisc launch as “the most successful introduction of any major electronic product in history,” according to New Scientist.

SelectaVision was all about convenience. “The RCA VideoDisc system gives you more of what you want from TV—choice,” read a print ad. And if the store didn’t carry your movie choice? Presto! SelectaVision’s Quick Delivery System came to the rescue, dispatching the item in a few days. The service, RCA said, spared a store the trouble of carrying titles RCA knew wouldn’t be big sellers. Who would foot the bill was up in the air. (Perhaps it should have just canned those titles from the start.)

Videodiscs also had one big advantage over popular videotapes and cable: better picture quality. But that came with a hefty price tag. RCA’s 20-pound contraption, the cheapest on the market, cost just under $500. The discs ranged in price from $14.98 to $27.95 for a two-disc set, though more than half of the initial 100 titles cost less that $20.

“It’s the simplest, most reliable, easy-to-service disc system there is,” Herb Schlosser, RCA’s executive vice president in charge of SelectaVision software, told New York. “The play’s the thing.” Its purpose was to play back pre-recorded material and to allow users to quickly scan a movie, music concert, instructional video or sports film for their favorite parts.

You’d slip the disc, along with its cover, into the front slot, flip the switch from load to play, and voilà! The player spit out the cover, or caddy, and started reading the 12-inch black vinyl disc with its diamond-tipped stylus. It detected changes in capacitance on the spinning disc’s tiny grooves, and then turned that signal into image and sound. (Capacitance measures how much charge a substance can store.)

Despite the fanfare surrounding SelectaVision’s release, critics were nonplussed. Some called it the least exciting videodisc system available. Playing off RCA’s nickname for SelectaVision, Manhattan Project, Michael Schrage of New York wrote: “A number of people expect the result to be like the Manhattan Project — a bomb. The reason is the technology. SelectaVision is a “grooved capacitance” technology, and that pretty much relegates it to the Jurassic era in terms of state of the art.” Ouch.

Its competitors, Philips/Magnavox and Pioneer, manufactured optical discs that were read with lasers, a cutting-edge advance at the time. (The technology would later be adapted for digital audio in CD players.) But these machines cost between $700 and $800.

None of the videodisc players let users record, however, even though some of these companies, RCA included, were already developing that technology. In the end, this deficit may have spelled out R.I.P. for SelectaVision, and the videodisc in general.

In its first three years, RCA only managed to sell about 550,000 consoles, and on April 4, 1984, it pulled the plug. The system was never released in Europe. The company lost about $580 million on the project, and the losses crippled the company so much that General Electric later took it over in the U.S.